For many people, the psalms extolling God’s glory as seen in creation and the provision and sustaining of nature are some of the most worshipful texts in the Bible. It turns out that many of those psalms don’t just contain reactions to what we would find naturally beautiful and breathtaking, they are also exhortations to see value in even the parts of creation that we might initially recoil from, as the Creator would. When we extend this practice from our appreciation of the natural world to how we operate in personal encounters and relationships, we will find that we are also opening ourselves up to transformation and finding ourselves in the company of the one who loves and saves us even in our frailty and failings.

A fairly common metaphor for understanding how God cares for us and helps us grow in the Bible is that of a mother bird watching over her chicks. There may be even more to this metaphor than we realize if we really reflect on our identity as chicks - having an extended time offered to learn and grow that allows both more advanced full maturation and closer bonding between generations (a scientific term expressing this is neoteny). Are we mainly tempted to rushing ahead and trying to prove how amazing we are and so the Kingdom must need us more than we need the Kingdom, or can we receive the chance to always be learning and growing under God’s care, humbly acknowledging our limitations and vulnerabilities, as a gift that actually helps our shared contributions to the Kingdom that God calls us to and supports us in?

Hosting the World Cup brought the United States a unique opportunity for cultural encounter and exchange at a massive scale this summer. There was some concern about how things would turn out going into the event, but some people ended up enjoying the stories of discovery and support through regular people experiencing the wonder of regular things that can often get taken for granted even more than the soccer. We can be reminded that a celebration and reconciliation of the diversity of all the people of the world that God has created is also a key element of our ultimate experience of salvation, so how can we appreciate and cultivate more of these types of glimpses of God’s promise in our lives and relationships?

We can often feel a tension between an emphasis on memory that risks having us feel stuck in the past, and a push towards change and the future that can leave us feeling unmoored and uncertain. There are powerful Biblical examples where the legacy of God’s faithfulness can actually provide rich soil, and our memories can be like seeds - planted so that new things can grow with roots of familiar values and interconnected support guided by God’s overarching mission for the redemption and reconciliation of the world. How can we learn to operate this way for our specifically called role within this eternal vision?

God as our loving and exemplary Father has given us an amazing creation to experience, explore, and find God’s presence in, while also creating settings and circumstances where we can learn, grow, and even be stretched so that we might be formed more and more as children after God’s values.

The many models and metaphors of the atonement and how we are saved by Jesus that are described in the Bible in part remind us that we are not just saved individually, but that we are saved into the family of God as part of the redemption and restoration of all creation that God is pursuing. Paul in particular describes us as family that are co-heirs with Christ - with contrasts strongly in character with how heirs often seek advantage over or even to eliminate each other, especially in his cultural context of the Roman Empire at the time. What an amazing gift, and one that we can figure out how to share with all of creation just as Jesus has shared with us. How can this profound salvation be lived out?

We may often think of redemption as mainly having a general spiritual second chance sort of meaning now, but the breadth and depth of language about the atonement we see in the Bible to help us understand the power of the atonement reminds us that it has financial roots for how people can be trapped and exploited in desperation, but God seeks to move for freedom and empowerment and is willing to deal with our failure or harm we experience to do so. With such generosity, what response might we have in our salvation to participate in God’s Kingdom with what was been shared and restored?

There are some models and metaphors of the atonement that are not as easy for our modern brains to connect to because of distance from the culture they were written in and how society has evolved throughout church history. A conception of God’s salvation working like a feudal Lord restoring their control and honor can feel disconnected from what comes to mind for faith now. We might get profound inspiration, though, from the reminder that God uses honor and glory in love, restoration, lifting up and including people in the work of the Kingdom by seeing dignity in the lowly and transforming our hearts and capacity to live for the thriving of all God’s people and creation.

For the disciples, Pentecost starts with still a lot of hesitancy as followers of a savior who was executed by the Empire that did not want to hear that Jesus didn’t stay dead. That feeling would make a lot of sense, but the Spirit moved to initiate a new kind of victory that couldn’t be stopped or overcome by earthly measures of power and success. Participating in this different kind of victory, as demonstrated by the countercultural way the early church started living by “dividing up the spoils” of the Spirit’s movement, is part of the legacy of salvation and atonement we are invited to, also - one initiated by our Christus Victor.

In our understanding of salvation and the atonement, the forgiveness of sins and invitation to new life for individuals understandably gets a significant focus, but the Bible also praises Jesus for achieving a redemption and recreation of all of humanity and the establishment of a whole new character of life we can participate in when this new humanity is shared with us. We may find it is different than we expect, or we may doubt that we really might be able to take up a cross and follow Jesus in this way, but the hope of scripture calls us to believe we all can have in common not just with Adam, but with Immanuel, Jesus, as well.

As we consider all the different ways the Bible describes the breadth and depth of how the atonement extends God’s gracious gift of salvation life, it can happen that our focus fixates on mechanisms for how sin is solved, or on the tasks of Kingdom ministry we are invited and enabled to participate in. These are certainly important, but even more foundational is the salvation is our reconciliation with God who created us, loves us deeply and moves to restore the connection we can be prone to pushing away from. Recognizing and responding to the ways God reaches out and draws us in, and prioritizing that connection in our life is important for not just knowing about, or agreeing with, salvation, but actually experiencing it.

In the modern West, we tend to have heard the most about a model for the atonement called “penal substitution” that focuses on Jesus receiving punishment for our violations instead of us. This is part of how the Bible speaks about our salvation and reconciliation, but for something as profound and transcendent as salvation, it shouldn’t surprise us that there are lots of models and metaphors used. Another foundational model is that of the “scapegoat,” and when we see how all these ways we grasp at understanding interact with each other, we may even find understandings of salvation that expand our experience and commitment to live out our faith as much as possible.

As someone who grew up in the church, whose grandparents were founding members, and who went on to carry the church’s values into his own life of ministry, Bill gives us funny and touching stories of what we’ve shared, as well as good grounding in what matters most in holding us together and giving us vision and purpose as a particular community of God’s Kingdom. May we be full of celebration for what has been, thankfulness for what is, and hope for all that is still to come.

The hope of eternal life is profound, but we also hold onto the promise of what Jesus taught us to pray about God’s Kingdom being “on earth as it is in heaven,” and a sense that salvation isn’t something to wait around for as much as it is something to be transformed by and richly experience in our lives now. How does God demonstrate that reality to us in scripture and invite us to participate in this understanding with all reality in our lives all the time?

God offers us salvation by grace that we can participate in through faith, but don’t have to worry about earning, and we can learn to let go of arrogance about our worthiness over against others. What helps us root ourselves in this grace and find joy in the ongoing faithful life of salvation God offers that we might have peace even in the face of struggle and knowing our mortality?

It is a great temptation to give in to the sunk cost fallacy that because we have stuck our heels in about one problem or another, we should just stay stubborn and stuck even when we realize a harm and see a possibility for transformation God is calling us to. Admitting our quagmire and letting go of something we’ve clutched to can feel like a death, but Easter reminds us that Jesus’ death and resurrection give us a chance at something better for all darkness, sin, oppression, failure and misguidedness if we just trust to let go of them before God and take up the new life Jesus offers.

The role of prophet is a powerful one throughout all of scripture. There can be a lot of conceptions of what prophets do, including being mainly a sort of inscrutable predictor. In the life and ministry of Jesus, though, we can see what the prophetic office is truly most about: embodying, making real, God’s words and movement of eternal character into the deepest hopes and struggles of any particular moment and circumstance. God showed a different quality of loving, serving authority to the people returning from exile through the prophet Zechariah, Jesus embodied it again in the face of the Romans at Palm Sunday, and we can trust that God will continue to speak to and show us how to embody transformation where it is needed most today.

It often seems like our weaknesses, failings, and the things others would cast us out for are completely determinative - even the tiniest bit ruins everything and is insurmountable. God shows us many examples in scripture, though, of how the power of holiness and grace can overcome any force that we have otherwise assumed is to unclean or without hope for reconciliation or new life to be possible. If we can take on that prophetic vision not only for ourselves in turning to God, but in how we view and treat each other as followers of Jesus - what transformation could come to our world?

When we go through trials and struggles, part of our experience is often that we feel alone and hopeless, or even like things may just end with us. When we can see ourselves as part of God’s overarching movement in the world, though, that can help change perspective and help us find hope. Not only can we see even our difficulties as part of a larger, beautiful picture of salvation, but the connections God brings with others of all backgrounds, experiences and generations become both the means of and a destination of hope and transformation.

One of the apparently central tasks for the people of Judah returning from exile was to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. How strange, then, for a prophetic word from God to come that “Jerusalem will be a city without walls,” instead bounded by God acting like a fire that has room for lots of people from lots of places and backgrounds. How can we have our resources and programs be so shaped by God’s vision and values that might also find God’s refining spirit defining what choices we make with “bricks and mortar,” and in the priorities of what is most important in the salvation we live and share?